There is a better way of winning new customers than pushing you and your B2B offer at them. Customers love it because they’re buying rather than being sold to. You’ll like it because it feels better than selling and you’ll get more long term business from it. Using social media well has made it even easier to do. It’s also a great way of testing new products, services and even a new business. I call it, and please if you call it this too mention me and my company, ‘BRIDGING‘.

For over 25 years my company, the Business Advisory Bureau Limited, has been helping executives go it alone as independent consultants, trainers, coaches, advisers and freelance B2B professionals. We don’t let these new micro business owners out of our grasp until they’ve learned and practised the skill set which will allow them to bridge.

No-one buys from a desperate business owner

You may have heard the story of why we came up with a process to help B2B professionals win more business and keep their customers/clients satisfied and providing referrals. It bears repeating:

As a trainer and coach I was using video cameras on a key account management (sales) programme I was running. I was demonstrating something in a role play and to my horror when I saw the playback I realised I was pushing my offer down the throat of an intimidated, and fortunately mythical, client. What had gone wrong was that my own win-win influencing skills had deserted me.

The reason they’d deserted me was that, in real life, we’d just started a new business and I was desperate, really desperate for clients. Frankly, we were only months away from not surviving. My over zealous need to get the sale in real life had spilled over to a role play in a training room.

I realised that not only hadn’t I fully understood what the client wanted and needed but I hadn’t established any credibility to allow the client to feel it was the right thing to buy from me. Seeing how bad I’d become at ‘selling’ on that TV monitor saved our business.

Alligator soup

Think of two people, you and your prospective client, at opposite sides of a rope bridge. Both you and your prospective client are safely on dry land. The bridge is wobbly and underneath is a river with alligators waiting to gobble up those that fall. What can you do to draw your prospective client to meet you in the middle of the bridge so that you exchange something they want (e.g. your service) for something you want (e.g. your fees).

Why social media and all forms of cloud communications can help you is that by the time you arrive at your side of the bridge your client should already have decided that you are credible and have the solution or can provide the opportunity that they are looking for. In other words, they’re interested in you and want to meet you. Hint: check your networking skills and your LinkedIn profile to see if you can do this.

Then when they’ve got to the bridge you’ve got to pull them to you by asking questions, listening, summarising and influencing or negotiating so that they really want to meet you in the middle. You both fall in the river if you feel or they feel that you are selling to them.

A bridge too far? Never

The art of B2B marketing, including using social media (no excuse with WinWeb in the cloud services), is to get more days in every month when you have a prospective client at the end of the bridge that you can solve a problem or provide an opportunity for. Then you need the ‘pulling’, (just don’t tell your spouse or partner that’s what you’ve been doing!), skills to win the business.

Find out more at TonyRobinsonOBE.com and join the greatest Micro Business Owner community in the world, free, at EnterpriseRockers.co.uk

Most entrepreneurs I’ve met are looking for opportunities to make money all the time. If they followed the advice on these start up websites they wouldn’t just copy stuff and they’d be too late in getting the product or service to market and the opportunity would have gone.

Look at Loubi (Christian Louboutin to you), if he hadn’t read an article about a slashed out shoe with a red line, then thousands of rich women around the world wouldn’t have fallen off his killer heels to, legs in the air, show off his signature red soles.

Dear reader and fan, I want you to take a look at the mind of an entrepreneur. Let’s take one successful one, Stefan Topfer, Editor of this Small Business Blog and one unsuccessful one, the aforementioned aberration, Tony Robinson OBE. They have two things in common; they’re both badly dressed (fleeces – urgh) and they look for business opportunities all the time.

The Recycling Opportunity

So, yesterday, Robinson rang Topfer and the conversation went like this:

Robinson: I’ve just seen on the BBC News site that a scientist has proven that giant dinosaurs could have warmed the earth with their flatulence.
Topfer: Ja – I mean, so?
Robinson: Well, where is the equivalent place today where hundreds of dinosaurs, produce masses of hot air?
Topfer: In your House of Commons and House of Lords?
Robinson: Precisely and why will this supply of huge volumes of hot air continue ad infinitum?
Topfer: Would that be because it is mainly a boys club eating vast quantities of posh nosh provided by the City and the top 100 CEOs and one or two media moguls.
Robinson: Yeah that and their humongous expense accounts that they can spend on Big Macs and pasties. It makes you feel good to know that we can now recycle all that dinosaur fuel for the benefit of the people.
Topfer: Ja, I mean nein, I mean how?
Robinson: You’re fab at technology, do the math and turn Parliament into a massive great hot air heater channelling warmth into the council housing, parks, stations and shop doorways where those with no dosh to pay for heating live.

I won’t carry on – as Topfer told Robinson never to speak to him again. The point is that here are two dinosaurs discussing a business opportunity that utilises a source of natural energy that has been available for thousands of years. There’s nothing original here apart from the possible opportunity.

Stuff to ignore

So ignore the stuff on websites that is ‘conventional business guidance’. ‘How to come up with a great business idea?’, ‘How to pitch your idea to investors?’, ‘Getting finance’ ‘There’s a business in you’, ‘What needs to be in your business plan?’, ‘Get a mentor from a Bank or Corporate’ and ‘How to sell’. the enterprise essentials are much less complicated and far more common sense and natural than this guidance.

Most successful entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed haven’t done any of the things that are regarded as ‘good business practice’. Most don’t like borrowing money, especially from banks. Their business planning is always in their head. Most of them are action rather than words people. They often copy and improve other people’s ideas and activities like crazy. The point is that time is money and opportunities come and go and they can’t be wasting time on this theoretical business stuff.

Instead, my advice to a start up, from my award winning series of entrepreneur interviews (see my book ‘Stripping for Freedom’) is:

Look for what customers want and are buying that you’d relish providing too.
Then, preferably by bootstrapping, check that you can afford to produce it as a product or service.
Then test market your product or service with its ‘twist’, like Louboutin’s red sole or, more likely, with an additional service that the competition aren’t providing.
Then from what you have learned launch your new business always remembering that you may need more products and services or even businesses to make the earnings you need to make.

Let’s Twist Again

This ‘copying and improving with a twist’ is important to the success of many entrepreneurs.

For example, the unique ‘twist’ that Stefan Topfer achieves with WinWeb is that he is absolutely passionate about beating the global competition not just by great cloud software and infrastructure but with exceptional customer service too. His customer service people are mentors. He’ll sack people that ‘sell’ his products and services as he believes in the customer buying what they choose that is absolutely right for them.

The great news is that everyone starting a business on their own can provide their own ‘twist’, a unique level of service, to support a product or service that customers already understand, want and need. Just get your offer out there as quickly as you can after testing it.

-Finis-

Option 1. using independent contractors/freelancers/other micro-businesses
Option 2. taking on partners or if you’re a limited company or social enterprise, other directors.

OK so I know that my two preferred options fly in the face of government advice, guru advice and business school advice which urges you to grow your business by taking on employees, particularly qualified business managers and leaders, but to me it is all a question of risk. My two options are risky but I believe, if negotiated and managed carefully, are not as risky as taking on a senior employee.

As my businesses have always been B2B service businesses my main worry and focus has always been winning and keeping customers. In over 26 years of starting and running my own businesses I’ve got a better track record of winning and keeping customers using my two alternative options than I have with employees, as executives and managers, however well trained. Most are fine but it’s the ones that are not fine that have proved deadly to our customers, our income, our profitability and most of all our own morale.

The main advantage of option 1 – independent contractors is that you retain total control of your business, it is flexible, it is a service agreement which is easier to manage in time and money than an employment contract with the associated regulations and it is a tap of skilled resource that you can turn on and off dependant on your workload and you don’t have all the associated on costs of employees including purchasing equipment.

Because most contractors/micro businesses want to continue being contracted in the future I find they become like partners of our business and we grow our businesses together. For example I have worked with the same contract trainers and the same designers and developers of learning media for over 20 years. We all pay each other on time too – as soon as we possibly can.

The main disadvantage of this option is that it can play havoc with your margin. However if you go for a very high quality and unique service you may be able to ensure the price you charge covers using contractors and remains competitive.

The main advantage of option 2 – taking on partners/directors – is that it is bootstrapping par excellence. Let me explain; I recently entered a business ‘to what do you owe the secret of your success?’ competition. My answer was ‘my business partner of 26 years, Clare Francis’.

We both invested time and money in our business, we’ll work whatever hours, whenever, in order to succeed. When times were hard we didn’t take money out of the business. We never needed status perks like employees ask for.

We are equally passionate about our customers and our offer to these customers, so much so than many are now friends too. We have complementary but different skills and most of all we trust each other – so implicitly that we don’t have to waste time overseeing each other.

I just love successful business partnerships and believe they are responsible for more successful start ups growing into substantial micro businesses than any other single factor.

My business partner Clare and her husband, Charles, also managed a very successful family business. Indeed, many of my successful micro business owner friends, who say they are going it alone aren’t really. They often, have a spouse or partner, beavering away in the background supporting the business and often holding down a job in the early stages of the start up in order to bring in family income.

Partnerships are my preferred option but it is as tough and careful a decision as deciding to live with someone.

Trust and passion is everything, in my opinion, to success in your own enterprise. This total trust and passion is there with my co-founder of the Enterprise Rockers, Tina Boden, and all the wonderful band leaders of our movement.

We trust each other so much and share the same passion that we’re all putting our own biz money and time, for no return yet, into making it all work.

So, before you do as the gurus recommend and take on a senior employee, do consider whether you’d be better using independent contractors or taking on a partner.

To bring the concept to life I asked if anyone had gone to a restaurant, as an example, and

1. Had a bad enough experience that they complained; and
2. Had an experience that was not quite bad enough to complain but they vowed to themselves they would never go back again.

A few people  put their hand up to the first option but everyone put their hand up to the second. They also said that in both cases they would tell all of their friends about their experience.

Talk about punching a hole in your marketing efforts.

Most companies are ready to respond to complaints, some are good at it but only a few really go looking for these ‘silent’ complaints.

The ones that do are particularly open to feedback from everyone everywhere and are tenacious in their pursuit of the silence.

They do this via clever emails, web feedback tools, letters, postcards and timely phone calls.

In doing this, there is no guarantee that your ‘silent’ complainers will talk to you but if you do going looking there are three things that will happen:

1. You’ll show that you really care about your business and your customers
2. You will find some ‘silent’ complaints that you can then put right; and
3. You’ll reduce some of the negative word of mouth that exists about your business that normally you would have known nothing about.

Are you ready to pursue the silence?

This was a question posed on Twitter last week and my immediate response was: “Don’t compromise & undercut competitors, offer something special/better in areas such as customer service, added extras…”

My thinking behind this reply was that all too often we focus on price as a way to compete yet this can be a disastrous strategy for small business operating within already tiny margins.  If you are in an industry competing with big business, it’s essential to find and build on competitive alternatives. This may be in areas I mentioned in my Twitter response such as customer service and those ‘added extras’ which big business are just, well, too big to offer. So, here are some ideas to get you started.

Your flexible friend – the thing about big companies is that decision making is often a laborious process, going through layer upon layer of staff before action can be taken. If there is a change in the market then you as owner of the business can act immediately, taking decisions quickly and efficiently.  You can adapt your business plan at a moment’s notice – a business plan should NEVER be set in stone after all. Use the flexibility you’ve been given as a small business to try new ways of doing things, whether that’s online, offline, using technology etc. While big businesses are still talking about ideas you can be out there putting them into action.

Collaborate – I’ve written an earlier blog about collaboration so I will just reiterate the importance of building alliances with other small businesses offering complementary products/services as an effective way to compete with bigger companies. If you want to go for a big contract but are missing an essential element (e.g. design) go and find a company who can and are willing to provide that service as part of the winning contract.

The power of plenty – this is a wonderful phrase I’ve borrowed from the UK Enterprise Rockers movement. Small businesses joining together can secure cost reductions in overheads and every day purchases through for example group purchases, marketing costs e.g. sharing exhibition space and much more.

Customer Proximity– chances are as a small business you know your customers by name and/or face or are at least getting to know them. How many big companies can say that? You can offer continuity of customer care throughout their buying experience, tailoring the service to what best meets their needs. You have the flexibility to follow up on that purchase and incentivise loyalty and are far closer to understanding their needs and wants than many of your larger competitors.

Differentiate – take a look at your larger competitors and think about where the gaps are in what they’re offering.  Often logistical and/or financial issues mean it just isn’t worth a bigger business offering particular products on a small scale even though they may meet customer needs, however as a small business it may well be worth your while producing them so just because your competitor isn’t offering them, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Online – many small businesses have a web site now but chances are they’re not making the most of that online presence to connect with their customers.  Be clear about your brand and present that consistently and professionally online. There is no reason why anyone has to know that you’re just a one or three person band provided you deliver on what you’re offering. Most large companies are using social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) to engage with customers and you can do the same, again provided you are consistent and genuinely have a two-way communication with them, so there is a far more level playing field online when it comes to securing customers.

Be social – not social in terms of having a chat (although that’s always a good way to engage with customers) but through offering social incentives for customers to buy from you. There are many ‘shop local’ initiatives taking place and if your business operates in a growing and thriving local community then getting involved in charitable events e.g.advertising, sponsorship, donations and working with other small businesses to offer each other’s customers loyalty discounts can be a great way to build your customer base.

It did remind me of something else that I have been thinking about lately: Skepticism is rife and trust is not easily won but your people can help.

However, back to the original article. It’s a great list of 12 ideas. The two that I really like are:

5. Follow up calls to check that everything is ok!
10. Giving me the same deal as the new customers you’re trying to attract!

Why? Well, first of all I personally know about the power of the first one and have written about before in: Customer experience, bikram yoga and word of mouth marketing. Also, we all have phones in our businesses but we often the things that stops us making the calls are time (just make the time) and thoughts around ‘what if they aren’t there’ (be prepared to leave a message).

The second one just screams of fairness and value, as Andy points out in the original post. The other thing that occurs to me is that it’s really easy to do. If you’re going to do it as a promotional offer to attract new clients then it doesn’t take a lot of work to apply the same offer to existing clients too. It will also give you an opportunity to get back in touch with them. And, in doing that with an offer of a better deal, I’ve always found with clients that I have worked with that it can result in some great new business opportunities.

We’ve all seen the news lately and heard of lots of large and small businesses closing down. No doubt, you’ve also seen the impact on your high street with both large and smaller, independent retailers shutting up shop.

However, it’s important to realise that despite uncertainty in the economic environment, high levels of competition and increasingly value and price conscious customers, there is demand and opportunity out there for businesses that provide good value products and services combined with great customer service.

This is backed up by research from the Institute of Customer Service which states that:

• Two thirds of retailers consider ‘customer switching’ as a significant threat to their future sales whilst a third consider this customer behaviour as the biggest single threat to their business.
• However, three quarters of the businesses surveyed believe that the delivery of good customer service is an essential differentiator in the current economic environment.
• This is echoed by 83 percent of customers surveyed who said that the quality of service that they receive is very important to them when it comes to retaining their loyalty as a customer.

That doesn’t mean that you have to offer the lowest prices and the best service to succeed. It is important to point out that whilst customers are looking for competitive prices many are not willing to sacrifice service over price. I wrote about this on my blog a while ago where I talked about an article on mycustomer.com, where Right Now CEO Greg Gianforte quoted an interesting poll from Harris Interactive:

“According to their research, some 84% of customers would be prepared to pay 5% over the standard rate for a superior customer experience, 62% would pay 10% more, 25% would pay 15% more and 11% would pay 25% more.”

What I am not saying is that we all should put our prices up (although for some businesses that can be a great growth strategy). What I am saying is that when we develop our customer service we must understand what is right and best for our customers.

Customer service should not always be about making things fancy or delightful as that’s not what everyone wants and sometimes it’s just not appropriate. Sometimes customer service should about making things easy or familiar.

Why easy? Well, we are all busy so making something easy and quick and saving them time and hassle can be the best gift we can give to someone. Would you value that? I would.

What about familiarity? Where’s the value in that? As customers we are people too. So, why do we like familiarity? Because it’s understood. It feels less risky. Would you value that? I would.

In the end, for some businesses great customer service may only need to save us time and feel risk free, particularly with your existing customers (your most important asset).

When you are thinking about improving your customer service in your business are you over thinking and complicating it?

Over the festive break I spent quite a lot of time ‘unplugged’ from the digital world thinking about how we can help ourselves stand out in front of our customers and, at the same time, help ourselves build better relations with past and present customers.

Here’s a few ideas that I would encourage you to think about doing more of:

1. Automation, particularly marketing automation, is becoming really popular and there is a lot of talk about how we can automate this and that, specifically, when referring to online transactions, communication, customer service etc. Whilst I understand the rationale and efficiency of these type of efforts, I often stop and think about what this would mean to me if I were the customer on the receiving end of automation and how would it make me feel. Obviously, it will depend on the type of business you are in and the volume and size of transactions you have but do take the opportunity to stop and ask yourself what is the cost to your customer relations of trying to automate as much as you can. Try to resist the temptation to dehumanise everything. Put the time and effort in and do it yourself. In doing so, you will automatically personalise it and it will make you stand out.
2. If you want to make people feel good about your business, make it less about the business and more about them. Here’s a simple idea: Pick up the phone/meet more customers even just to say ‘Hi’. You never know what will happen.
3. We live in a digital age but don’t you get the feeling that you get a little overloaded from time to time with all the emails and web-based stuff that you see? How about winding back the clock a few years and try to do less by email and more by letter or postcard. We all love getting postcards and letters, right? Excited, I came across a great web-based service and set of applications for Android, iPhones and iPads called Touchnote that can help with that. What they do is allow you to upload pictures and images, write a personal message and they will post a postcard to a single or number of participants. Obviously, you have to pay for this service but what a great way to stay in touch with some of your customers and make you stand out at the same time.

What do you think? What would you add that has helped you stand out and build better relations with your customers?

In each of the reports, one trend/word/observation/conclusion….call it what you will has emerged. Many people many jump in and guess that it might be ‘unemployment’ or ‘parenting’ or ‘greed’ or ‘criminal’. However, you’d be wrong. The word that has come up in all of the reports is ‘courtesy’ and, particularly, the lack of it by police officers conducting stop and search in many of the areas where the riots took place. The reports suggest that this was a “significant factor in sparking the disturbances”.

Now, I am not condoning the riots. Not at all. The destruction and lawlessness that took place was completely wrong and all perpetrators should be punished.

But, the reports made me think about the breakdown of relationships between the police, youth and local communities and, particularly, how if you don’t start relationships off on the right foot then it’s all down there from there.

Being courteous doesn’t mean you have to agree with someone it just means that you are being polite. Here’s how I think it all links together in a chain:

Courtesy
leads to
Respect
which leads to
Real conversation
and
Trust
which helps
Relationships
to develop thus enabling
Actions
to be agreed and
Solutions
to be delivered

Take one of these links out of the chain and it collapses or we get something that is a lot less than what we want

Now, you may ask what has all of this got to do with small businesses and customers? Everything, I would say. This chain could applied to customer service, team management, leadership, employee engagement, police and community relations, parenting, schooling, marketing….everything.

Time to be more courteous to everyone?

The “Fix the Holes in My Bucket” Syndrome

A pet peeve of mine is when companies forget or mistreat their existing customers. It happens in a number of ways. Here are four quick ones:

1. Poor service
2. Always giving the best deals to new customers
3. Not doing what they say they will do
4. Changing the rules without telling their current customers

This got me to thinking: What if we lived in a world where all companies took care of their existing customers as well as new customers, where companies were trusted and liked, where doing business with a company was a good experience, where companies and their employees cared about their customers and each other?

What if we lived in a world where companies like that were the rule, instead of the exception? What kind of world would that be?

I believe that it is a world we can achieve, a world worth striving for.

To understand what it would take to create it, I believe we must first understand a little more about the world that we live in now.

We Live In a Changing World

While there may be great examples out there of companies and brands that treat all of their clients very well, I believe that the majority of companies are stuck in, what I like to call, “The Hole in My Bucket” Syndrome.

Do you remember the song?

There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.

Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, fix it.

And so on…

In the song, Liza advises Henry that to fix his leaky bucket, he needs straw. To cut the straw, he needs an axe. To sharpen the axe, he needs a stone. To wet the stone, he needs water. However, when the song asks how to get the water, the answer is “in a bucket!” This implies that the only bucket available is Henry’s leaky bucket. Of course, if Henry’s leaky bucket could carry water in the first place, it wouldn’t need repairing! Consequently the song gets stuck in an infinite-loop.

When we think about this in the context of our businesses, is the solution really more “water” to replace the lost “water,” or to be more specific, more customers to replace lost customers? Should the focus not, in the first place, be on fixing the leaks before adding new water?

I believe that this is the first step to creating a sustainable business and platform for growth.

Fred Reichheld, in his book The Ultimate Question (2006), had it right when he talked about good and bad profits, and how the pursuit of good profits was the route to sustainable growth.

To quote Fred:

Too many companies are addicted to bad profits, profits that come at customers’ expense and drain the value out of customer relationships… Bad profits come from unfair or mis- leading pricing. Bad profits arise when companies save money by delivering a lousy customer experience. Bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value… A company earns good profits when it so delights its customers that they willingly come back for more and not only that, they tell their friends and colleagues to do business with the company. The right goal for a company that wants to break an addiction to bad profits is to build relationships of such high quality that those relationships create promoters, generate good profits, and fuel growth.

Further, I believe that businesses that pursue bad profits do so by employing huge amounts of traditional marketing strategies, where the belief is he who shouts the loudest to the most people in the most places will get the most customers.

That may have been the winning strategy of the 20th Century, but not any more. In 2006 Chris Anderson, in his influential book The Long Tail, argued that technology was fundamentally changing the way companies do business and how they are viewed by their customers. To quote Chris:

We’re entering an era of radical change for marketers. Faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it is waning, while faith in individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers.

This is borne out by many surveys. An influential one from Edelman, a global PR firm, in 2009 and 2010 showed that trust in companies’ communications is going down and competition for our attention is going up. Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2010 (www.edelman.co.uk/trustbarometer)

All of these things present huge challenges to the way that we currently do business. It questions the way that companies find, engage and communicate with their marketplace, as well as calling into question the traditional methods for marketing and growing our businesses.

So, let’s look at the overall situation of our changing market place:

• The effectiveness of traditional marketing methods is going down.
• Trust in company and brand communications is going down.
• The voice of the customer is being amplified by the use of new technology, the internet and social media.
• Service levels seem to be going down, or is it that we are demanding more?
• Competition is ever increasing.
• Despite the data, companies are still largely customer acquisition focused due to an over-riding focus on short-term results and bonuses.

However, in the face of such compelling data and a changing marketplace, why are companies not changing their ways to ones that are dedicated to pursue sustainable growth or, what Reichheld called good profits?

I think there are a number of reasons:

1. Traditional marketing methods and their supporting departments are deeply embedded in our existing business modus operandi.
2. There are deep cultural, behavioural, management, leadership and knowledge barriers to change.
3. There is too much focus on short-term markets, results, announcements and bonuses rather than on longer term sustainable growth and customer relationships.

So what next?

While the challenges may look tall and the road long, I believe the objective is eminently achievable. It will take leadership, vision, teamwork and guts to overcome these challenges, but it is an objective that I believe we should strive for.

The ABC Building Blocks

That’s all very well and good, I hear you say. But, where do we start?

Well, let me tell you about a conversation I was having the other day where I was asked the same question.

I was talking to a roomful of business owners about growing their businesses through their customers and better service, and during the presentation we talked about the changing nature of doing business and the number of reasons why customers leave. According to my research, one of the main reasons that customers leave is not due to price and quality issues, but due to poor service or a perceived indifference on the part of the companies to them, i.e., their customers didn’t think they cared enough about doing business with them.

In order to manage this I suggested that businesses should pay more attention to their customers and build better relationships with them if they wanted them to stick around for longer. Simple stuff, right?

Then, someone spoke up and said that while they understood the reasons they should be building better relationships with their customers, they didn’t quite get how they could do it. Now, the how would have to depend on a number of factors, including their type of business, their customers, and the sort of relationship that they want to build. But I can say that I believe that if every business was to go back to basics, the ABC’s of building relationships both internally and externally, and operate under some simple basic principles, then I would wager they’d see a marked improvement in service levels and customer retention and loyalty.

Here are some very basic principles that we get taught growing up as children, ones that we often lose sight of when we grow up and enter the world of business.

Those principles are:

1. Be more courteous/polite towards each other. I think there is truth in the saying “manners maketh the man” and that we all like to treated with courtesy and politeness. Even in the age of the “Me generation,” this type of treatment still stands out. Also, it’d make your Mum proud.
2. Give everyone your respect. Whether someone is your customer, a potential customer, a teammate, superior or subordinate, giving someone your respect is one of the highest honors that you can give someone and it can bring out the best in them.
3. Do the things that you say you will do when you say you will do them. I think we all like reliability and trustworthiness. Even if that means saying you will call back and you can only do so with bad news, at least the person on the other end of the line knows where they stand. In the absence of information the mind can do funny things and can tend to make stuff up that’s worse than the bad news.
4. Be more punctual. This is quite a personal one, but one that I think deserves a mention, as time is one of our most precious resources and seems to be becoming more and more precious. So respecting someone’s time and making sure something happens when it is supposed to can speak volumes about how much you care about and respect the other person’s time.
5. Be honest. I believe that most people just want others to be straight with them. Trust us and tell us the truth. Most of the time we can handle it. Even if we can’t handle it or it upsets us, we’ll respect you for being honest with us.
6. Be open. Great ideas can come from anywhere and we do our customers, our people, and our- selves a great disservice by not building our businesses on this principle. This is probably one of the hardest principles to put into practice as it can go against many business and corporate control structures, but if you have the courage to pursue a set of relationships that are receptive to new ideas and arguments, it is a great way to build trust and drive creativity, innovation and productivity.

I would argue that each of these on their own cannot be argued against. Put together and implemented I think they become a powerful foundation for better relationships with our people and our customers.

This all sounds too simple, I hear you say.

Perhaps.

But as in life and nature, we know that sometimes the simplest solutions are often the best.

Is it easy to build this type of culture?

No, not always. It will depend on you as a leader, the business you are in, the relationships that you have with your team and with your customers.

Is it worth it? Definitely!

Just imagine if every business, or maybe just even the ones that care enough to make a difference, made a 1%, 5% or even a 10% improvement in the areas that I mentioned above. Then I believe that would put them head and shoulders above most of their competitors and, at the same time, create great places to work. Just think of the benefits for customer retention, customer loyalty, word of mouth marketing, referrals, employee retention and your ability to attract the right sort of talent for your business.

And, it may even change the world into a better place

Again, this was written as a manifesto across at Changethis.com earlier this year. You can download a full pdf copy of the manifesto here to share and spread the word.